Who’s more difficult, Liches or Dragons?
ZeroxSP7
Member Posts: 55
Title. Trying to figure out if I should take on the Windspear Hills or the Temple Sewers first. I beat a dragon before in SOD and the shadow dragon in Umar Forrest. But idk how that one compares to the likes of Firkraag.
Also I have not been able to beat any Liches at all. I can’t find a single way to get past those damn spell and combat protections they’ve got before they cast time stop and blow my party to bits with a pit fiend. I thought about casting some offensive level 6 and 7 cleric spells as Anomen is high enough level to cast them. Otherwise I’ve got nothing.
Also I have not been able to beat any Liches at all. I can’t find a single way to get past those damn spell and combat protections they’ve got before they cast time stop and blow my party to bits with a pit fiend. I thought about casting some offensive level 6 and 7 cleric spells as Anomen is high enough level to cast them. Otherwise I’ve got nothing.
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I find the Shadow dragon more difficult then the red one because it is easier to protect the party vs fire then vs level draining, if you have beaten one you should beat also the other.
The beholders can be dangerous if you don't use the special shield, I never buy it, with it are easier and the earlier you face them the easier they are as they scale with the party xp. Going early to the Temple Sewers you can find a Beholder and a couple of Gauths, later in the game in the same place you can find some Beholders. In the TS you find also your share of undeads, optional, but there is an useful item in their area.
I recently posted the levels for liches in another thread ... your other thread, actually.
What's the alternative? Retreat, and wait for the short-duration PFMW spells to wear off. If the lich starts casting a spell, and you're out of sight when that Time Stop goes off, it'll just waste those three time-stopped rounds. If you can slip a few attacks in ... well, it only takes one lucky hit for something like Azuredge to kill a lich, even through Stoneskin or mirror images.
I had my PC equip The Burning Earth. Apparently Liches can only be hit by +4 and up weapons? I thought that was only a Demilich immunity. Jaheira and Minsc had +3 weapons and those had no effect.
I paid attention to the dialogue box to see the dice rolls and watch what the Lich was casting too. He didn’t cast protection from magical weapons. Just Improved Mantle and Mirror Image which I was able to dispel. Well, I for sure dispelled mirror image with Dispel Illusion. I’m not sure which spell Pierce Magic dispelled since he also cast Minor Globe of Invulnerability and Fire Shield and another one that I can’t remember.
Anyways, my PC was able to land hits. I had Anomen start up with Sunray which took out quite a bit of the Lich’s hp. Bolt of Glory didn’t do anything for some reason. I don’t know why. But it interrupted his spell casting. Nalia cast Pierce Magic, and then my PC just kept wailing on the Lich until he dropped. The fight lasted no more than about 15 to 20 seconds. Now I’ve got Daystar and I feel ready to take on all the Liches I can.
So uhhhhh…….yeah. We’ll see what happens.
However, this time, as everyone charged at the lich, right before he was able to get his initial protections on, Jaheira, Minsc, and Anomen all landed hits with their respective weapons that are under +4 enchantment. Makes me wonder what the issue was with the Lich in the City Gates district. I’ll be taking on the Twisted Rune here in a moment.
Not true. Standard lich immunities only protect from nonmagical weapons. If they have anything more than that, it's a spell they cast. Or a demilich.
In the case of the City Gates lich ... he casts Improved Mantle as a "prebuff" - a trigger in the script that applies a few defensive spells as soon as he sees an enemy. Then he gets a few more defensive spells as an explicit spell trigger, and only after that moves on to normal spellcasting. Improved Mantle protects against all weapons of +3 enchantment or less, so that's what you were seeing.
And apparently, you weren't able to dispel that. Dispel/Remove magic gives the "Dispel Effects" string feedback when it "hits" a target, regardless of whether anything was actually dispelled. And Improved Mantle doesn't have any effect on the creature's animation, so you can't tell whether that was removed just by looking at it. Out of curiosity, what were the levels involved? That lich is level 19; what was your dispeller's caster level?
Against that list of defensive spells, Pierce Magic would have taken down the Globe of Invulnerability; the only spell the lich had in the "spell protections" class. Which means that instead of being immune to all spells of level 4 and below from the spell, he was immune to all spells of level 5 and below from natural lich immunities. And instead of having zero magic resistance, he would have -15% or so (exactly the same, since negative magic resistance doesn't make spells hit harder). All in all, absolutely useless. There was no point in using that spell in this particular fight, because the one protection it removed wasn't helping the lich anyway. Sometimes creatures have scripts that are kind of dumb.
Improved Mantle and Stoneskin are "combat protections", which would be vulnerable to Breach on a non-lich. Fireshields are "specific protections", also vulnerable to Breach. Mirror Image is an "illusionary protection", which is vulnerable to divination attacks (Detect Illusion, Oracle, True Sight) and thief Detect Illusion; those all work even on liches.*
* Well, actually, there's a bug in one version of True Sight. The inquisitor's version hits as level 5 on the initial pulse, so liches are immune to that. But not to the remaining rounds of the spell.
Cast detect invisibility then breach on the mage. Then just melee everyone else to death. if you’re not quick enough, the mage will cast time stop. At that point, you’re effed.
But yeah I’m totally cool with just blasting Liches with sunray to death : D super effective. I’ll clear out the sewers then go back and kill Firkraag. I’ve already cleared out his dungeon.
The last time I ran it was with my evil party, led by Dorn. I ignored the mage early on, let her use Time Stop to cast Gate and Meteor Swarm, and then just whacked her; a dispelling hit from the anti-paladin sword sealed her fate. The pit fiend was no threat (PfE 10') and the meteor swarm not much of one (lots of resistance to fire and magic). The lich went down first, to spike traps in the entryway where he teleports to. The vampire isn't scary when your entire melee front line has level drain immunity. The fighter doesn't even have a weapon. Only the beholder gave me pause; I ended up sending Dorn and Korgan after it while holding the rest of the party back until it was down. No Shield of Balduran, just unbeatable saving throws.
I'm sure jmerry will correct me if there's some corner case I'm missing, but I don't think Liches gain any benefit whatsoever from using the Mantle spells instead of PfMW, as they are already immune to normal weapons. But then, that's just classic Bioware game design for you.
PS. Sunray has also been my go-to strategy for stomping Liches without taking advantage of their inappropriately low character levels. Even if it doesn't kill them outright, it usually disrupts their Time Stop. Death Fog is another good low-level spell that gets through the usual set of immunities and can disrupt spell casting.
And indeed, no lich or rakshasa in the entire game has Mantle, Improved Mantle, Minor Globe of Invulnerability, or Globe of Invulnerability memorized. They show common sense that way.
But ... those spells still show up sometimes. Why?
That comes down to how stuff like contingencies and spell sequencers are handled. Enemy mages effectively have those, but it's all handled in their combat scripts rather than having the ability or effect like a player would. Just apply those spells directly, using script actions that don't rely on memorization. And throw in some longer-duration "prebuffs" like Stoneskin while you're at it.
The developers wrote a number of generic combat scripts for this, mostly distinguishing mages by their level. And both liches and regular mages are drawing from the same pool of scripts. So that City Gates lich happens to get a script that puts Improved Mantle and Globe of Invulnerability in the initial flurry of "just apply this rather than casting normally, it's a sequencer or contingency or prebuff" spells. Oops.
Often when I faced liches, using a berserked char worked well, or some specific
protections. Dragons on the other hand have been quite versatile, especially in
some mods, and some were very hard to kill. At the least they were more annoying,
especially the damn dragons that seemed to be constantly hasted. Liches with better
AI were also annoying but I'd say dragons were much more annoying.
My cheese routine for getting the lich down is to go in, wait until he does his first shenanigans, go out,
sleep once in the inn, go back in; if I still have issues I go out again after he does meteor swarm, rest
again, then go in and kill him. Sometimes I also just get the sword from the chest and whack him down.
I actually think he was fairly weak once you know how to work him down.
Kangaxx was more annoying, I usually need Korgan to get him down. Korgan with that sword, though,
often reliably wins against him, especially when buffed. I think this is the only real weakness of liches,
that they don't know what to do against berserked enemies. One possible fix I'd do is to give liches
means to summon some undead helpers or so, a few skeletons may be helpful.
I don't know how SCS handles these situations, so I am speaking about semi-vanilla games mostly.